I've never done an album like this. With Biophilia, I was being like Kofi Annan - I had to be the pacifist to try to unite the impossible. Maybe that was a strange, personal job between me and myself, to show how overreaching I was being as a woman. The only way I could express that was by comparing it to the universe.

I'm self-sufficient. I spend a lot of time on my own and I shut off quite easily. When I communicate, I communicate 900 per cent, then I shut off, which scares people sometimes.

I've always appreciated working with people I have chemistry with, who are friends, and where you feel that the work is growing while you are getting to know each other better.

Solar power, wind power, the way forward is to collaborate with nature - it's the only way we are going to get to the other end of the 21st century.

Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.

I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.

The reason I do photographs is to help people understand my music, so it's very important that I am the same, emotionally, in the photographs as in the music. Most people's eyes are much better developed than their ears. If they see a certain emotion in the photograph, then they'll understand the music.